


Clean

by notyourgold



Category: X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: AU of an RPG, Angst, Feelings, Inspired by Roleplay/Roleplay Adaptation, Past Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2018-06-09 08:43:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6899065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notyourgold/pseuds/notyourgold
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was a moment between dreaming and waking up when everything seemed real. In his first lucid thought of the day, he always wished he could linger there longer</p>
            </blockquote>





	Clean

**Author's Note:**

> These aren't really the Clint Barton and Gabriel Cohuelo of comics or movies or whatever. I wrote this one in response to things that were going down in an RP I'm in (shout-out to [X-Project](http://x-journal.net/Wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page), everyone join up). A big thanks to Cai for the reading and the editing and the re-reading and the re-editing, and for inspiring this one.

There was a moment between dreaming and waking up when everything seemed real.

Gabriel, in his first lucid thought of the day, always wished he could linger there longer. He'd keep his eyes closed, defying the light that beckoned them to open, and he'd lie still. Disappointment inevitably settled on him right as reality did, just as he felt his side sinking slightly into the mattress, the weight of a blanket brushing against his shoulder, the loose wrinkles of sheets kicked off in the middle of the night under his ankles.

Then his eyes would flutter open, and he'd stay still for a little while, taking in the room almost clinically. He'd sigh, and then he'd toss the sheets the rest of the way off, staring at the ceiling for a just another moment before sitting up and planting his feet on the carpet.

The routine was more or less the same today, even though the dream had played out longer than usual. The awful feelings were there, right on cue. A wet spot by his cheek clued him to a string of drool on his lips, and he wiped his face before rising. There was another body in the bed with him this time, something that had seemed like a good idea hours earlier but was now the source of a deep discomfort. Without casting a glance at the other man, he slowly stood, pushing himself off the mattress and shuffling the sheets away from his body. A pair of 2(X)ist trunks were crumpled on the floor in front of him. He scooped them up, not really caring whether they were his or his companion's, and put them on just in case someone was still crashing on the couch in his living room.

He needn't have worried. Folded blankets sat neatly in a stacked pile on the sofa. The coffee table was clear of the glasses and bottles that he remembered seeing before he snuck into the bedroom the night before. Things looked the way they'd looked in the dream, actually — neat and clean and untouched. He blinked a few times as he scanned the room for signs of life. For a second, he wondered if he'd managed to land back in the between-space.

But that was impossible, and he took a tentative step forward on his tiptoes to prove it. Gabriel stood there for a second, the carpet cushioning the balls of his feet and scratching his toes. Above him, a fan moved air through the room, bringing goosebumps to his bare arms. He ignored all of it, instead staring dumbly at the furniture and trying to get rid of the pit in his stomach. He wasn't sure exactly what he was waiting for, just some kind of sign or vision. Something that would make him feel like he was control. That maybe he could —

A sound from behind drew his attention, and his head whipped toward the bedroom door, his eyes focusing intently on the crack he'd left open and searching for signs of life. The sound of creaking springs followed, heralding a face and a conversation Gabriel wasn't equipped to deal with. So he did the only sensible thing he could think of and pivoted on his heel, beelining for the bathroom. A sense of dread hit him as he moved to close the door, and he scanned the living room one last time. A note sat on the far end of the sofa, but another noise from the bedroom kept Gabriel from reaching for it. He squinted as he closed the door, peering through the narrowing gap into the living room and trying to make out a single word or letter.

The note looked real, or at least real enough that he figured last night's party hadn't been a figment of his imagination. He pushed the thought out of his mind and flicked on the bathroom light, then closed his eyes and took a deep breath, listening for the plodding sound of footsteps or a muffled voice. Nothing came, but he still locked the door as a precaution. The man in the bed had probably just rolled over. All this panic was for nothing, and he'd fled like an idiot. As if he were the one who didn't belong here.

Gabriel turned to the sink, and his expressionless face stared back at him in the mirror. He leaned in to scan it, hunting for new blemishes or wrinkles, new freckles or worry lines. The inspection was another part of his morning routine, something he'd started after figuring out how his powers were aging him. A scrutiny born from vanity, at first, and then a kind of scientific curiosity. Now it was a force of habit.

Three days ago, that had been the thing that pulled him out of the dream. His face. He'd seen it, and he looked too young. No stubble, no dark circles. In the dream, he said as much aloud. "That's not right." He'd sounded less surprised than resigned, his eyes downcast as he spoke. That was the last image Gabriel had of the world he'd constructed: his dispirited expression. Everything dissolved around him, and he awoke, the bliss of sleep replaced by darkness, anxiety, and the sound of rain pelting down against his windows.

Through the door, he heard a voice. He couldn't quite discern what it was saying, but he didn't much care. With a frown and a sigh, he double-checked the lock. Then he turned to the shower, reaching past the curtain and turning the faucet. The extra noise, he figured, would provide him some much-needed cover and an excuse to stay silent.

The spray from the shower burst to life, drops landing on his arm as he pulled the curtain shut. He stepped away from the tub, stripping off his underwear and kicking it away with one foot. The boxers landed on the bathmat in front of the sink, in a pile just as rumpled as he'd been when he picked them up.

Droplets pattered against the tub. The voice, a little louder now, called his name. He didn't move, staying on the dry side of the curtain. The water flowed, and he closed his eyes to focus on the sound. Then he leaned against a painted wall and slid down until he was seated, the baseboard pressing uncomfortably into his tailbone, his legs extended in front of him onto cold, smooth tiles. The loud polka dots of the shower curtain seemed to scream at him, and Gabriel closed his eyes again to shut them out.

He really needed to shower. The smell of booze and cigarettes seemed to be clinging to his pores, a more powerful reminder of last night's excesses than hiding in the bathroom to avoid his one-night stand. But he didn't want to wash the dream off. He'd never gotten as far as last night before, not that he could remember, and that was unnerving. It had to mean something, but Gabriel didn't know what. Squeezing his eyelids even more tightly, he tried to push out the world. If he was lucky, maybe he'd end up back in the between-space just so he could figure things out.

It didn't work. He was too aware of everything. The shower, the tiles, the man in his bedroom, and now the clamminess of his skin. He opened his eyes. The haze of steam was starting to fill the bathroom. Leaning over toward the door, he rose slightly so he could reach up and switch the fan on. For a second, he thought he heard the voice again, but the sound of the shower and the whir of the fan made it hard for him to tell if it was real or in his head.

His head. He'd been spending a lot of time there lately, as Charles occasionally reminded him. It was always an observation, never an admonishment, but there was still a message lurking somewhere underneath it.

"You seem to spend a lot of time thinking these days, Gabriel," he'd say, the faint British accent making the Anglicization of his name somehow okay.

Gabriel always shrugged, sometimes offering an attempt at a witty retort, but he heard the underlying warning — and for a few days, he'd try to heed it.

Then the dream would come back, and he'd be back where he started.

The steady thrum in the bathroom suddenly changed pitch. He glanced toward the shower, unable to help the thought that Charles had somehow changed the water pressure to stir him into action. The idea, ludicrous as it was, made him smile. He brought his knees to his chest, then pushed against the floor, leveraging himself up against the wall. Brushing aside the array of polka dots, he stepped into the shower.

It had done him in once, the shower. He'd fallen asleep on the couch and slipped comfortably into the dream, the whole thing playing out, his brain declining to highlight the obvious inconsistencies or holes he now found so frequently. Then, in the dream, he'd heard water running. The noise was muffled, but it was obviously out-of-place. The dream version of himself, suddenly disoriented, shifted his attention to search for the source of the sound.

That had been enough to wake him up. By the time Amber — who'd been staying with him in Westchester while some roommate drama or other played out in Brooklyn — finally emerged from the bathroom, he'd had enough time to go from perplexed to melancholy to annoyed. He was surprisingly standoffish with her, and even though he'd eventually apologized, it had cast a pall over their weekend. She left the next day, earlier than she'd planned. He hadn't spoken to her since.

He didn't know why. He could have called her any time, but he still resented her for the disturbance, even as he knew on every level that it wasn't her fault. That was early on, though, when the dream was still new — before he could fill in all the details. Before it came easily enough that he could replay it. Back when he wanted so desperately for it to be real that he couldn't accept the ways in which it wasn't. It was the first time that he'd gotten past the movie; the first time he and Clint had actually spoken.

Before then, it had been mostly about a feeling. A movie, black and white, was playing on his TV. It was never the same movie, he didn't think, but it was hard to say. It was never anything he really remembered, and the scenes he'd managed to hold onto never added up to something that made sense. That wasn't what stood out, though. That wasn't what was important. It was the closeness that mattered. The movie played in the background, and he'd be there on the couch, feeling Clint next to him.

The first few times, before he ever saw the face or heard the voice, he knew. He just did. There was something so comfortable and familiar about it. He'd know intuitively that it was Clint, lying there, nestled against him, and it would startle him awake. It took a while before he got over that shock, the shock of having Clint back in his arms.

But when he did, that's when the details started to come to the foreground. Clint's sneakers, casually discarded on one side of the coffee table. The soft cotton of their T-shirts. The smoothness of his skin and leanness of his frame. The timbre of his voice.

It took a while for Gabriel to actually hear Clint again, because Gabriel always spoke first, and his speech was like a siren cutting through the world his mind built. His voice was an unwelcome intrusion of reality, one that sometimes crossed boundaries into the waking world in dismaying ways. He'd woken up from the dream in a co-worker's bed once, only to discover he'd spoken aloud. To fend off the other bartender's curiosity, he'd rambled off some excuse about sleep-talking, making up some anecdote on the fly that got a laugh. And then, unsure what else to do, he changed the subject pretty definitively by pushing the man back down onto the mattress and using sex to shut him up. Everything that followed had been rather dispassionate. The whole time Gabriel had been distracted, hopelessly trying to remember what he'd said.

“Where've you been?" It was a hard phrase to explain to someone you'd spent the night with, but it made perfect sense in the dream. It was always the first thing he said, the same question he always asked. Clint would laugh, his voice playful as he said something reassuring. Never the same thing, but whatever it was, Gabriel always found it comforting, and he'd shift a little so that he could pull Clint more firmly against him. The movie would keep playing, and they'd chatter a little bit. At some point, if Gabriel's apparent fealty to details hadn't ruined everything, he would shift toward one end of the couch. And that's when Clint, who had been more like an invisible presence at this point, a kind of oneiric wraith, would shift, rolling a bit and looking up at Gabriel.

The force of the eye contact was always surprising, even though the more he had the dream, the more time he spent thinking about it, the more he knew what to expect. Dream-him would realize that he'd forgotten how bright and piercing Clint's eyes could be. How quickly they could create the warmth that now spread over him.

"Hi," Clint would say, always blinking, always smiling.

"Hi," Gabriel would respond, always sounding like they were seeing each other for the first time. They weren't on the couch anymore. They were in bed. How they got there was never clear, a fact he never realized until he woke up, because by that point, he wanted so badly to surrender to the phantasmagoric.

They'd smile at each other for a while, Gabriel studying Clint's face, Clint studying his, both of them settling into the kind of peace that he couldn't even remember experiencing even when Clint was alive. He'd be so elated it felt unreal, and he'd say something like "You're here" or "I can't believe how lucky I am" or some inconsequential phrase that he couldn't even remember later, because most of the time, the feeling was so strong it was all he could recall.

After enough time, that much happiness would unsettle dream-him — even dream-him was a skeptic — and so Gabriel would reach out to touch Clint's face, because he'd start to worry it was all a fantasy. He'd reach out to stroke the younger man's chin or to brush back his hair or even just to try to hold him, and without fail, that's when he'd wake up — every time, every time for so many nights he couldn't keep track of them anymore. He'd have some thought, catch some detail that triggered an awareness of the fourth wall, and just like that, the dream-haze would dissipate, the front his subconscious had propped up would crumble. He could feel reality looming like a wave approaching the shore, and for a moment he'd be in the between-space, where he had a choice — this world or the other one. The world where nothing was real and his mind was constantly playing tricks on him, but everything was okay again; or the one where he'd finally managed to pick up the pieces even though he knew he'd never be whole again.

Without even realizing it, he'd start to wake up, the decision made for him, the choice ripped away. Longing. Disappointment. Resignation. Always the same.

Or not always. This morning, something was different in a way he hadn't really understood until just now. Standing in the shower, the air thick with steam, Gabriel felt foolish for thinking that he could possibly wash last night's dream away. The other world clung to him, sinking into his skin despite the water rushing down around him.

Everything lingered; everything felt so fresh.There was still this pit in his stomach, one that was a little too much to deal with. And as much as he wanted to heed Charles's words, to focus on the water pressure, the heat, the beads dripping off his skin, his head was taking over.

Gabriel turned the faucet as high as it would go and reached to reposition the showerhead. Paying no mind to the spray beating down over him, he sank down into the tub and leaned against the shower's back wall. He closed his eyes again, abandoning all concern for the moment and trying to force his way back into the dream.

He'd never tried to will himself back so fiercely before, not that it did a whole lot of good. Images appeared, but he knew they were recollections. Hollow facsimiles that lacked the emotional intensity that he'd experienced before he woke up this morning.

That was a once-in-a-lifetime feeling, and he knew it. He'd never again feel the way he felt in last night's dream, when dream-him reached over to brush his hand against Clint's face, and he'd felt skin. His face had lit up, and he'd shifted, propping himself up on one elbow as his other arm drifted down to Clint's shoulder and pulled him in tighter. There'd been a delighted laugh — maybe his, maybe Clint's; he wasn't sure. And then they were in bed, both supported by pillows, facing each other.

"God," he'd said, something catching in his throat. Their shirts were gone. "God, I love you so, so much."

Clint had smiled, full of joy and exuberance and something else Gabriel couldn't quite put his finger on. He'd scooted toward Gabriel, his face leaning forward until they were kissing, their cheeks brushing against each other as their lips met. Something electric had shot through Gabriel, filling some void that had always been present in the dream but that he hadn't known about until then, until Clint's stubble was pressing against him, until Clint's chest was on his chest, until Clint's arm was slipping underneath his back while they kissed, until his soft lips had touched against Gabriel's, letting Gabriel's mouth fill with the taste of Clint, the taste of whiskey and cigarettes and sugar donuts and hot cocoa and—

The wave crashed. Even now, just thinking about it, he felt the gut punch. He'd almost let it go; the dream had almost continued, and he'd almost shut out the nagging voice in his brain, the one reminding him that Clint didn't taste like whiskey and cigarettes. Clint would never taste like whiskey and cigarettes, because Clint, forever eighteen, tasted clean and sweet. Like snowflakes melting on your tongue. Like the crispness of fall.

The air felt heavy. Even with the fan on, steam had filled the bathroom. Every breath felt damp and slightly laborious, so Gabriel focused on inhaling and exhaling. He sat at the bottom of the tub, his eyes blankly staring at the faucet in front of him. And then he closed them, focusing on the sound of his breath and the gentle massage of the water against his skin.

He sat there for several long minutes, contemplating moving once the shower turned tepid, but choosing to stay put. Goosebumps rose on his arms as the water finally ran cold and he stood, shivering as he ducked underneath the stream to grab the handle. He slid the shower curtain out of the way, and the sound of vinyl wrinkles rubbing against each other made him cringe.

There was no doubt about it now. He was awake.

Almost on cue, the voice called his name as he reached for a towel. He hadn't thought about the man who had been in his bed while he relived the dream, but a part of him had hoped the guy had left. Gabriel had just accepted the wish as fact, and had almost forgotten he was ever there.

He continued drying himself, deciding the fan was loud enough that he could avoid a response. The mirror was still fogged, but he couldn't help glancing at the glass as he stepped onto the bathmat. He felt as though he'd been in here forever, as if hours had gone by, and he wanted to see the proof. He used the towel to wipe the water off the glass, but the air was still damp enough in the bathroom that it didn't do much good. He bent slightly, positioning his face toward the patch he'd cleared. His reflection was wet and blurry.

A knock came at the door, and while he wasn't exactly expecting it, he wasn't startled or surprised. "One second," he called back, wrapping the towel around his waist. He bit his li, steeling himself as he waited for something, anything, to happen.

Nothing did.

Gabriel let out a fairly resigned sigh before flicking the switches that turned off the lights and the fan. The constant hum disappeared, but instead of an audible silence, he heard the muffled sound of voices from the TV in his living room. He made a face, then reached for the doorknob, keeping one hand on the towel while the other wrapped around the metal. The steam had started to clear, leaving a wet film on the surface. It was cool and unpleasant, but he let his hand linger there there, motionless for a few seconds while he listened to the shuffling on the other side. The tiles underneath his feet felt slick and damp.

It was time.

He twisted the knob slowly, dread and anticipation filling every part of him. The lock popped, and he let out the breath it turned out he'd been holding. Then he pulled open the door, letting the light of reality flood in.

"Hey," Clint said, turning to look at him over the back of the couch. "Where've you been?"

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, hey, you should read [untune_the_sky's companion piece](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6899635) because it's pretty great too.


End file.
